 From around the globe, it's The Cube with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hi, and welcome to The Cube's coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm your host, Justin Warren. And today I am joined by two lovely gentlemen. We have Brian Cahill from a company called Frogslayer which is interesting. And we also have Chad Kenny from Clumio. Gentlemen, welcome to AWS re-invent 2020. Chad, it's been about what a year since I think we last spoke at re-invent last year. Why don't you catch us up on what's been happening in the last year of the quarantine times? Awesome. Well, excited to be here, Justin. Thanks so much for the introduction and hosting us. So it's been an exciting action-packed year, I will say. We've had a bunch of new innovations. I think last time we talked, we were just getting our first native solution inside of AWS for EBS. And since then we've evolved the solution dramatically. Clumio is a secure backup as a service offering for the enterprise. And this allowed us to be able to scale from just EBS into being the industry's first platform to go across public, private and SaaS all in one service. And we innovated within AWS a ton. So we expanded from EBS to EC2 and RDS. We brought in one of the most native services outside of Snapchat. So we kind of progressed the enterprise from the traditional Snapchat primitive into a true AirPrize class backup and built in a time series data lake that allows enterprises to decouple their data from the infrastructure and really be able to provide tons of value into the future. So it's an exciting time for us to really bring new innovative solutions to the market. That's an impressive amount of work given what else has been going on in the last 12 months to be able to ship that much stuff. You've been really, really busy. And you brought Brian on. Now Brian, Frog Slayer, tell me a bit about the background for the name of the company there. Frog Slayer, the name actually came from an initial founder who was trying to protect the animals, wanted to take care of nature and stuff and accidentally stepped on a frog. So he got nicknamed by his buddies Frog Slayer and that then became the company name. So tell us about Frog Slayer. What is it and your role there? What is it that Frog Slayer does and what's your role there? Frog Slayer does business consulting and then we developed custom software. So our goal is to help businesses get past a hurdle. So a growth business that's kind of stuck, make them more efficient, more productive, so they can kind of move to the next level. And my role here is the head of IT that custom software we build, we host for our clients. And so we try to offer it to them as a SaaS solution. So it's not either custom software but it's kind of offered as a SaaS solution to them to consume. Terrific. So how long has the relationship with Clumio been going on? It's been about four months now. All right. And how did you get introduced to Chad and the team in Clumio? We'd started with AWS writing our own backup scripts. And then as we started to move more of their past services like RDS and then RDS went to Serverless and Aurora, you just had to keep upgrading and changing and tweaking your scripts. And so we started looking around to say, hey, is there a software we could use instead of doing this ourselves? And so through a VAR we got connected with Clumio. We were checking out a whole bunch of solutions and most of them were snapshot managers just using the APIs to do the same things we were doing. Whereas Clumio was doing it totally differently where they would actually take a snapshot and then rehydrate it, take that data and then make it more like a traditional backup where you could deduplicate it and save on costs and stuff. Right, okay. So Chad, is that something that you've been, is that one of the many features that you've added in the last 12 weeks or is this something that a little more fundamental to the way Clumio works? It's very fundamental. I think what we're doing is both doing efficiencies around the data itself. So dedupe compression and of course security around encryption, but we ingest the data index and catalog it and then make it so that customers can get fine grain granularity for how they restore even down to the database record. And so one of the big things that we've seen especially in cloud first customers such as Frogslayer is they're really trying to use either the native tools to start with or build your own type models and the costs increase dramatically. The complexity of not having a catalog and index make restores incredibly hard. And it just becomes a much more painful model of hidden costs left and right. And so what we wanted to do is really provide a unique simplicity to be able to protect all of the AWS accounts and even all of the data assets across clouds in one single pane of glass and give a user experience that was dramatically different than having to run various scripts or build your own or have a tool on-prem and have a different tool for this cloud versus another cloud. And by having this consolidated index obviously drive a ton of value around leverage from the data. Interesting. So Brian, you mentioned that this is your relationship with Clumio has been only about sort of four months. That sort of smack in the middle of the pandemic that's been going on here. Was that a trigger for you looking at alternate options or is this something that you've been planning for a while? No, this has been on our roadmap for a little while. Just as we started using more AWS services and trying to figure out, yeah, how do we scale what we're doing? We're looking for more of an enterprise backup but then as we looked around most of the backup solutions you end up posting the software, upgrading the software and maintaining things. Whereas Clumio offered us this back solution. And have you noticed a major change since you've been using Clumio? Yes, what Clumio offered was the ability to because it's a fast solution, it's a, there's an air gap between us and the backup. So I'm not posting the backups or the data. It's in a separate account and I can't even delete it. So there's kind of a protection level that someone in our end can't accidentally delete the stuff we're backing up. Right, and one thing that I've noticed is in the news a lot more over the last couple of days but it's certainly been hitting a lot this year is the idea of ransomware. So a lot of customers that certainly that I speak to have been quite concerned about what's going on with that. So how are you, Brian, addressing that within your organization? Do you feel comfortable that you're well protected and what else are you looking at that you're trying to protect yourselves from? Right, when it comes to ransomware, we try to have our client data in such a way that no one person can access or delete all of it. And so that's where we initially had separate AWS accounts for every client. And with Clumio, we now have Clumio maintains that separation. So they're keeping that air gap for us. And then, you know, we're doing our own stuff internally just to make sure we don't get something but the backups in Clumio are kind of that second step for say something gets past all of our safeguards because we've got another safeguard in place. That sounds pretty prudent, so Chad, is that something that you're hearing from a lot of customers, the need for this separation of powers within the system? Yeah, it's coming out quite often. And I think one of the big challenges here is to deliver an air gap solution with other types of data protection products, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud, have a ton of complexity to it. Whether you're buying a separate appliance and you have to create a network air gap or whether you're actually replicating from one AWS account into another AWS account, the cost just doubled. And so what we built in was a system that not only is immutable, but as Brian mentioned, there's no ability to actually delete the data because the time to live for the data that's persisted is defined by the policy. And so if a bad actor was to get into the environment, there's no way that they could potentially go into our system and actually delete anything. But if you look at like AWS as an example, if most customers are storing snapshots inside their account as a whole, and there's vulnerabilities even beyond ransomware and just an accident or a bad actor even inside the environment, that's not even ransomware. And so protecting that is one of the key capabilities of the platform where we're outside of the service, outside of the cloud in many cases to protect the customer's data and make sure that they can restore it to any account in the event that even a bad actor gets access to it. Yeah, so Brian, one thing that I like to ask customers about particularly around cloud services is they've changed the way that we do things and why we started using cloud is often not what we're actually using it for today. So with respect to Clumio and your services that you're running in cloud, what's something that you've noticed that you're now doing that surprises you? One of those added bonuses that you weren't really expecting, have you seen anything like that as you've managed to start using Clumio that did everything that you wanted it to do and now you're finding there's these new opportunities? Yeah, one of the big advantages of Clumio was when we took snapshots and replicated them out of the source AWS account, it's like in the source account, there was deduplication enabled. Once you replicate it to another AWS account, it rehydrates the snapshots so everyone takes up the full amount of space. And to start hitting this like, how much data do I retain versus like, oh, this is really expensive. I should like, lower my retention. And we just, that totally went away with Clumio. And then as far as the cloud as a whole, what's cool is that as they're coming up with more past services, so RDS, where I don't maintain patches in the OS or on the SQL or Azure's application service where you're not maintaining the OS, that's kind of moving it the next level up as far as less that you're maintaining and you're more maintaining your code and your application. Right, and how important is the cloud native capability of Clumio? There's plenty of backup solutions around and we've had them for many years because data protection is not a new idea. A lot of what are now cloud native, we try to put things into the cloud first. How important is it to have something which understands cloud native? It basically means they're totally aware of what we're doing and so they're not trying to take an old solution and make it fit in the cloud. They built it for the cloud from the ground up. So when you get in their user interface, there's not all of these old buttons and knobs and stuff. It's very simple. It's a policy, a tag, and then inside the account, the tag grabs objects. So they've made a very simple user interface that saves a lot of time on implementation. Excellent. What are some of the things that you're looking to do in the future now that you've bettered things in and you've now got four months of solid experience with the product? What are you anticipating that you're going to be doing next? We're excited about, we're starting to put some of our customers in Azure's cloud, which Clumio is developing capabilities for that. And then Clumio is also working on capabilities for some of our business applications. So the idea of having all of our backups in one place and last separate buckets you've got to go manage is exciting. Yeah, so Chad, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, they're words that have caused a bit of controversy over the years. It does certainly sound like a lot of customers are using or at least exploring multiple different options. And certainly for yourselves, you'll have customers who exist in one cloud and others that will be in a different one. So how are you addressing the idea of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud? Yeah, great question. So our belief is that data is going to disperse itself more and more, especially as time goes on. And there's multiple phases to this kind of cloud adoption that we see. We see kind of the initial lift into public cloud which kind of created that first hybrid example, then there's the optimization within the cloud. So they're looking for cost reduction and operationalizing. And then it's kind of like looking at ways of, how do I utilize different clouds for different things that may be more operationalized or more optimized than others? And so we really believe in this world of creating a single platform or fabric that goes and expands across all clouds, consolidates an index and catalog into one view for the end user and allows them to be able to push data to any cloud that they need to longer term. And at the same time, protect it. The fun part about migrations is, yeah, you can move data, but when you're protecting it at the same time too, it allows you to actually keep your production up and running, restore a dev environment somewhere else to play around with it and do it in multiple different potential clouds and then have that initial data that's still fully protected in your environment. And so I'd say that the protection side is a really cool one. The second one, as Brian mentioned, was the whole data lake concept that sits behind where we decouple the data from the infrastructure. And with pass services, this is incredibly important because let's say a year and a half from now, the database engine's not even supported with the snapshot that you have left over in your account you've been retaining. You've not got to go through the process of upgrading and getting it up to the Rev to actually even get it working. In our world, we create logical backups of those datasets and they're instantaneously available for direct query access even right in the GUI. And so now this decoupling of infrastructure brings significant value right now. But into the future, this opens up opportunities to be able to do ETL pipelines and actually leverage the data well beyond backup into other use cases. So to finish up, looking forward, always like to have a bit of a view of what the future holds. It's one of my favorite parts of being at re-invent as we get to see the new technology and what the possibilities are for what we could use, take something, take it home, have a bit of a play with it and see what we could do for next year. So maybe Brian, we'll start with you. What are you looking forward to in 2021? What are your future plans? Looking forward to migrating more of our stuff to platform as a service offerings, where we're taking advantage of the fact that the cloud has built some of the base layers and we can just build on top of that. And then the second one that's been exciting is the scalability. So with AWS as serverless and the other Lambda and different things that are running out where we don't need to run physical EC2 instances or always on databases but things that can scale up and down based on our client workload. That's just exciting as far as our infrastructure and just the ability for cost savings, but also that just in time scaling for our customer demand. And Chad, yourselves at Clumio, what can we, can you give us a hint of what we might see in 2021 from Clumio? Yeah, so the first thing I'd say that I'm most excited about any new year is just seeing the advantages customers get with the platform, right? Like we did a lot of innovation during this time. I said COVID had some benefits and some downsides from just company growth and not being close together and having that feeling but we innovated incredibly quickly and we were heads down and highly efficient. And so I'm excited about really showcasing a lot of the innovation that we built during this year. And I think our customers are moving to the cloud faster than ever. And so I'm excited to see a lot of that. What you'll see from us is more and more innovation outside of just the traditional realm, changing the user experience dramatically with new innovations, which sounds kind of broad but think of it as creating more and more of that fabric. We're gonna get into new public clouds. We're gonna get into new SaaS services. We're gonna expand the user experience in the core platform for recoverability, for security, for enabling easy workflows for various different use cases. And so I'm excited about taking the data and really leveraging it into multiple different use cases outside of data protection on into the future. Well, it sounds like we have a lot to look forward to from Clumio. I personally look forward to hearing more about it. Hopefully we get to catch up a little bit earlier, not quite wait the full 12 months between re-invents but if not, we'll definitely be seeing you again next year and hearing about all of the new innovations that you've managed to come up with. You've got 12 months, there's plenty of time. Definitely, awesome. So thank you very much, Brian. Rylan Cale from Frogslayer and Prachad Kenny from Clumio, been my guest today. I've been Justin Warren for theCUBE and all of our coverage here for AWS re-invent 2020. Do check out all the rest of the videos and we will see you next time. Thank you.